Postcard Row: The Victorians the Bulldozers Missed

The row of ornate Victorian houses climbing the hill on your right, with their steep gables and candy colored paint jobs, is probably the single most photographed house front in San Francisco, and it very nearly did not survive the twentieth century. These houses on Steiner Street were built in the eighteen nineties by a developer named Matthew Kavanaugh, part of a wave of Victorian construction that eventually covered San Francisco with something like forty eight thousand ornate wooden homes.

Most of those houses in the surrounding Western Addition did not make it. Starting in the nineteen fifties, city planners targeted this neighborhood for urban renewal, clearing block after block of Victorian housing in the name of modernization, erasing entire streets of exactly the kind of homes you are looking at right now. This row, sitting at the edge of Alamo Square park with the hill providing a buffer and a view, survived the clearance that took so much of the architecture around it.

What was left behind became an accident of fame. The houses, backed by the downtown skyline rising behind them, turned into one of the most reproduced images of the city, appearing in something like seventy movies, television shows, and advertisements, including the opening shot of the sitcom Full House. Tourists now line up along the park fence every day to take the same photograph, often without knowing that the row behind them is less a monument than a survivor, one short, intact stretch of a neighborhood the city spent decades tearing down around it.